New Photos Show a Reality the ‘Kony 2012′ Video Misses

Advertisements and NGO billboards clutter every spot of available real estate at a round about in Gulu.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

A young girl holds her sister in Lahibi, on the outskirts of Gulu.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Religious elders fill up on a buffet lunch served during a workshop while a Spanish telenovela plays in the background.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Gulu's fast growth has left little room for animals to graze.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Kony2012 is screened for a group of civil society leaders in Gulu on Mar. 30. Many were torn between being glad for the attention and funding, and disliking the film and Invisible Children's Gulu operations.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

At a church on the outskirts of Gulu, hundreds of people gather to celebrate Palm Sunday on Apr. 1.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Augustine Ochara sells chickens, and poses with one.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

A bus breaks down on the Gulu-Kitgum highway in Northern Uganda.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Kids play in an abandoned railway car.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Dr. Alex Layoo, the director of the Kitgum Hospital. His typical day includes deciding whether to spend limited funds on the generator or the ambulance.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

School children play in the puddles.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

Families of patients, Catholic sisters, and nurses gather at Lacor Hospital in Gulu. Missionaries and international aid groups have worked in the region for many years.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

A woman purchases goods at a shop in Kitgum.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

At the end of the day, market boys burn the trash and hang out before heading home.

Photo: Glenna Gordon

The video calling for a national campaign to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the International Criminal Court’s #1 most-wanted warlord, has been viewed more than 100 million times since it was published on March 5. The day of action it calls for is tomorrow, April 20. While most people agree that Kony should be brought to justice for his crimes against the Ugandan people and children, the video has come under criticism for oversimplifications that could actually do harm to the people it aims to help.

For photographer Glenna Gordon, the inaccuracies were particularly shocking because she had spent two years in Uganda as a stringer for the Associated Press and knew that the facts on the ground were much different than what was portrayed. Not only is Kony no longer a threat to Northern Uganda, a fact glossed over in the video, but his army has shrunk to a few hundred.

“There was an enormous blank left in the video,” she says.

Gordon is also the photographer who took the now-famous photo of the video’s creators, Jason Russell and the founders of the charity organization Invisible Children, holding guns with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army during peace talks between Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government. In it, the founders look more like frat boys playing at war than serious humanitarian workers. Critics said their decision to pose with the guns smacked of a neo-colonialist attitude.

To try and fill in the missing information of the video and give viewers an opportunity to really see what Northern Uganda looks like today, Gordon hopped on a plane and for the past several weeks has been photographing daily life in the region’s various cities including Gulu and Kitgum.

“My goal was to create some texture, to be really specific so that we aren’t just able to impose our myths onto this place,” she says.

What she’s photographed is not a country living in terror, which Kony 2012 is unclear about, but instead a place in the post-war recovery process. Children who grew up in the Kony era are now either in adulthood or entering it. They no longer fear violence, but are instead fighting disease and unemployment. The current children don’t live in fear of being abducted but instead are enrolling in new schools and playing outside.

New businesses are growing and the local leadership is engaged in the difficult processes of peace building. There are still giant obstacles to overcome in order to improve the well-being of Ugandans, such as governmental corruption, but Kony is no longer a threat. He’s not even in the country.

“The reality is that it looks like a region getting back on its feet,” says Gordon.

Since Kony 2012 went viral, Invisible Children has released a second video that clears up some of their earlier reporting and confirms Gordon’s analysis of the area. That video, Kony 2012 Part II – Beyond Famous, gives a more detailed account about the size and location of Kony’s army, and addresses some of the more contemporary issues facing Northern Uganda such as the need for social programs that will help with the reintegration of former child soldiers.

The problem with that video, says Gordon, is that it was only viewed by a fraction of the people who saw the original one, and that it still sends the message that stopping Kony is the most immediate way to help Northern Uganda.

“It’s not,” she says.

Based on her reporting, Gordon says there are a host of other more pressing issues. For example, because people were forced to flee their land during the conflict, Gordon says that one of the top priorities right now is sorting out how to enforce land titles.

One particularly terrifying problem is the spread of nodding disease – a little-understood and fatal affliction that stunts children’s growth and development as well as inducing seizures. It affects thousands of kids in the region.

“Obviously there are still a lot of problems” in Northern Uganda, she says. But Kony is not one of them.

This photo project is the first time Gordon has used her photography as a kind of direct fact checking, but she says all her work is meant to broaden the conversation around under-reported issues.

“Here and elsewhere my work is very much about filling in the blanks, blanks left by mainstream media outlets and other inaccurate representations,” she says. “What’s happening in northern Uganda gave me a unique opportunity to contribute to the conversation.”

When Raw File contacted Invisible Children about the video’s alleged over-simplifications, they sent the following statement by email.

“The purpose of KONY 2012 was to make Joseph Kony famous. While KONY 2012 Part 2 goes much more in-depth regarding the LRA crisis, neither video was intended to be an encyclopedia, but a call for people around the world to become informed about the atrocities taking place and to take action to see that they come to an end.”

Gordon says that when she asks people in Uganda about the Kony 2012 video, she gets mixed reactions. Some people think any kind of attention is useful because they hope it will bring increased aid money to help with the problems that still exist. A lot of aid dollars are going away because the armed conflict is over.

Other people, she says, don’t want any foreign aid if it’s going to silence local voices.

“People are saying that they are going to fix their own problems and that they don’t want the American military to solve their problems and they certainly don’t want American college kids to solve their problems,” she says.

Gordon says a vast majority of people she’s met don’t want any kind of military solution like the one proposed in Kony 2012 because they’re afraid their family members who are still part of Kony’s forces will be killed. They’re also wary of an armed solution because in the past this has only lead to Kony’s forces retaliating by attacking innocent civilians — an issue taken up in Kony 2012 Par II – Beyond Famous.

And generally, she says, most people are still frustrated with Invisible Children’s reporting.

“One of the things that people I spoke to are really upset about is that the Kony 2012 video makes it sound like everyone’s problems are solved when Kony is captured,” she says.

As for her photo of the gun-wielding IC founders, Gordon says she never intended to hold it over the organization’s head. But as the controversy over the Kony 2012 video grew, that photo became an important part of the conversation about who IC really was and moved many people to question their motives.

“I think the photo confirms a lot of people’s doubts [about IC] and I think it’s an important part of the conversation,” she says.

Gordon says she has been asked by an IC official to apologize for the photo and find a way to retract it from the internet, which she refused to do.

“I think they have this vision of themselves as this peace loving, conflict solving righteous organization,” she says. “But often the version that they present of themselves is different from the version that other people encounter.”

Invisible Children did not respond when asked to comment on the alleged request.